Strategic Discipline Blog

Before moving to your One Year Plan it's important to understand that developing your strategy isn't enough.  Getting your executive team together to postulate, plan, brainstorm and discover your 3-5 year plan and then determine your key thrusts and capabilities isn't nearly enough to move the needle on your business.

Where Positioning Systems business development and coaching provide the real force to move your strategy is in the area of Strategic Discipline.  We not only help your team develop your strategic plan, but meld it into specific accountabilities, priorities, and disciplines to ensure it is executed.  Executing the plan is the key to growth and that requires Strategic Discipline.  Your One Page Strategic Plan, 3-5 Year plan, Annual and Quarterly Plans are the path, Strategic Discipline is the lever to make it reality.

If you don't feel this is important consider these statistics; In midsized companies 95% of employees have a poor understanding of their company's strategy.  50% waste time on non productive work.  Most employees don't understand how to link their performance to their company goals.  Why? A full 95% don't know what their job is.  According to Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton, "The Strategy-Focused Organization," Harvard Business School, "A mere 7% of employees today fully understand their company's business strategies and what's expected of them in order to help achieve company goals."

These numbers wouldn't be important if they didn't translate into a failure to execute and perform.  Goal alignment and strong performance are closely aligned.  The Incredible Power of Company-Wide Goal Alignment, Success Factors, 2010, notes that in strong performing companies goal alignment at the manager level was 44%.  In weak performers companies that number is ZERO!  That's correct. It's not a mistake why the weak performing companies fail to achieve goals.   If you fail to communicate your vision, execution automatically collapses.

It's critical to have a tool like the One Page Strategic Plan to communicate your company's vision and strategy.  However you must recognize the importance of implementation.  You must be able to get your people from the bottom to the top aware of their role in the priorities for the business.  They need to have specific measurable accountabilities that contribute to the business priorities.  That's how to get everyone rowing in the same direction. 

That's the ultimate result of getting everything right on the One Page Strategic Plan.  We'll look at the Annual Plan and how it connects to the 3-5 year plan next blog.